Detectives 1

When I was thirteen years old and healing from a cosmetic operation I read the complete Sherlock Holmes, a book gifted to me by an acquaintance down the block. Over the course of a week, I devoured it cover to cover, front to back. Holmes fascinated me. He was so very smart. Inquisitive. Autonomous. And except for an occasional hit of cocaine when he was utterly bored and without a case to engage him, he remained completely self-sufficient. From my sick bed I accompanied Holmes and Watson through the streets of London and England’s other regions searching out the criminals and wrestling with his nemesis, Moriarty. I had a few demons myself. At the start of a new adventure, Holmes would delightedly call out, “Come Watson, the game’s afoot,” and we three headed out to play. Probably I enjoyed Holmes’s seeming lack of need for a social world, his fierce independence, and piercing intellect. He solved his cases outside the official police channels; indeed, he eschewed collaboration with them often with derision. And he solved his cases following clues that seemingly only he recognized.

By the age of thirteen I had already become a voracious reader. I would read whatever I could put my mind upon, though then, except for A.C. Doyle and E.A. Poe I did not choose detective stories. In secondary school English was my favorite subject, and if I didn’t always then appreciate the readings, I suspect I must have been imprinted by them because I hold firmly in memory all that I then studied. I do not believe that I sought truth in the texts then, not even sure I knew there was such a thing. I read for the companionship. In my senior year I turned to existentialism and wrote my thesis on the Theater of the Absurd that certainly put a lid on the idea of Truth. Literature had become the game I played. At college I became an English major. I was trained in the discipline of New Criticism, and as a new critic I learned to read closely, studying the significant clues and patterns that would lead me to some conclusion, some meaning, some knowledge of who did it. I followed the words in long sentences, in metaphors, similes, and symbols. There were clues everywhere. 

For the past several years, I have been reading a great many detective novels and watching any number of detective series and shows. At first, I considered that the detective stories were in the moment a distraction from the pandemic and from the stench of politics. For the most part I successfully avoided Trump, the Republicans and Covid (though lately each has returned with an alarming vengeance) and I consumed these texts and shows with an avidity that occupied me for the duration. What game was I playing, I wondered? The detective genre seemed to me not unlike my reading practices: not to follow the plot but to ask questions of the characters and the author of them. I enjoyed these shows. I consumed the detective novels like I did Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. With pleasure and greed. Come Watson, the game’s afoot. I think my experience with the detective genre enhanced my rereading of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. In one of the Little Libraries that line the streets I walk I found P.D. James’s detective novel, The Private Patient, and I took it home.

There might be some connection between the work of detectives and the work of readers and literary critics, a connection that might go some way to explain why and how I have become so committed to the detective novel and detective series streaming everywhere. I had myself learned to be a detective seeking out traces and signs in the texts that would lead me to some answer, some recognition of the figure in the carpet: an awareness of my meaning in the work! There was before me in plain view the purloined letter if only I could look properly at it. I had the body—the book—but it was not lying dead the result of a crime, it was not a murdered body, though its presence nevertheless demanded solving. Whatever that activity—solving— might mean! Come, Watson, I called, the game’s afoot.